Zynga’s Ad Campaign for Mafia Wars, Considered Illegal

Except for the collaboration between Snoop Dogg and Zynga in order to promote Mafia Wars, the game developers have also run some really cool campaigns (in my opinion) in a few select cities. Unfortunately for the company, the city officials didn’t consider them as cool and decided to start an investigation since the campaign was apparently… illegal!

The campaign involved stickers representing bills of $25,000 on sidewalks, plus decals of broken windows left on car windshields – all of them followed by an invitation to visit the game on Facebook. One of the cities where this campaign was started is San Francisco, where Deputy City Attorney Alex Tse described the money stickers as “documented acts of sidewalk vandalism”, and described the ad campaign as “illegal and actionable”, according to a post on The Snitch.

“The City Attorney takes violations such as these very seriously, and intends to pursue every available cause of action aggressively against Zynga for these illegal marketing tactics,” Tse writes.

Until now, Zynga did not comment on the situation. Probably because they’re also amazed, right?

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